


stay, give me your shoulder

by naupathia



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: M/M, Post-Time Skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:27:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25064638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naupathia/pseuds/naupathia
Summary: “Hey, not that I don’t appreciate the company, but can you go get someone who can be hot and unobtrusive at the same time?”
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Sylvain Jose Gautier, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 79





	stay, give me your shoulder

**Author's Note:**

> a couple of AM war phase things (one sylvain POV, one felix POV) that i crammed together because something something love languages

It’s a pretty classic scenario, actually. People use it all the time when they write about being a soldier who finds love during war. Usually, it goes like this: in the wake of some grievous injury on the battlefield, a character wakes up to see a gorgeous maiden at his bedside. She’s anxiously waiting for the moment her lover awakens, or she might even be asleep in her chair, having spent so long watching over him.

Sylvain’s long since forfeited the right to be in any romance novel. So instead of a maiden, the first thing he sees upon waking, besides the hairline cracks in their old infirmary’s ceiling, is Felix. Who’s sitting three feet away. And - sharpening one of Sylvain’s throwing axes? Really loudly?

As his vision emerges into clarity, Sylvain watches as Felix grips a whetstone coated with honing oil and slowly scrapes the axe’s edge against it with a noise that he can feel in his teeth. Manuela surely would’ve kicked him out of the infirmary for that, if she were still around to.

“... _Felix?_ ”

“Sylvain,” Felix greets. “Are you ever going to tamp down on that snoring habit of yours or are you that dedicated to making people not want to stay the night with you?”

He groans, scrunching his eyes shut. The motion tugs at the layer of bandages that circle his scalp. Oh, right. Head wound. On top of the other ones. Sylvain can’t recall all of what happened this time, but the aftermath feels at least like a few steps up from that time he was nearly disemboweled, so there’s that? “Hey, not that I don’t appreciate the company, but can you go get someone who can be hot and unobtrusive at the same time?”

“Unobtrusive?” Felix scoffs. “I’m doing you a favor, you fucking ingrate. You use these almost as often as your lance, but you’re so indolent about maintaining anything! They’ll be useless to you if the blades get too dull. A subpar weapon can be the difference between life and death.” He makes another drawn-out nails-on-glass noise with the axe. He’s absolutely doing it on purpose. “But you knew that already.”

Ah. He’s gotta hand it to Felix, he can always come up with new ways to castigate him. Show concern for him. Same thing. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll make it up to you. Buy you dinner or something.”

“ _Or_ you can just take care of your equipment in the first place.” Felix sets the axe and stone down. “I would’ve done your lance as well, but-” He frowns. “I don’t... think it _likes_ me?”

“Hah, yeah, don’t take it personal. I mean, I appreciate the thought, but I wouldn’t worry about that thing. If it couldn’t take a little wear and tear, it’d make a pretty shitty relic. Plus,” He moves his fingers in a slow imitation of a spider walking. “Hard to deal with those twitchy bits, you know. They’re kind of a pain, have you noticed that? They’ve made some _really_ gnarly exit wounds. And also make it harder to hang coats on.” 

“You use the Lance of Ruin as a - whatever,” Felix switches tracks, probably deciding that ‘not disrespecting your ancestral weapon’ isn’t a worthwhile argument to pursue. “You’ve only been out for a day, so I haven’t actually been here that long. I was busy finding that... _evil_ creature you’re so attached to.”

“Oh shit! You found Dollface?” The destrier he rides in battle isn’t ‘evil’, exactly. She's just - she just happens to radiate more malice from her eyes than any creature Sylvain’s ever seen. And she has a rider who happened to be on an ironic kick when he named her. “That’s a relief. I totally lost track of her after I got knocked off.”

Felix hums an affirmative. “She didn’t go far. Unhurt, as far as I can tell, but Ingrid could give you a better idea of that. She’s in the stables with her now.” 

Sylvain drops his head back onto the pillows, slack with relief. “I’m glad. She’s a good girl. Did she give you any trouble?” he asks, then laughs when Felix’s baleful look gives him all the answer he needs.

When they were little, a gelding they were using to teach them how to ride had decided that Felix’s hair, which he’d just been starting to grow out, was a good thing to graze on. Felix never parted with his grudge over the incident, even after he stopped griping about it. If he really did go out to retrieve her himself, there was no doubt he despised every second of it.

Instead of the amusement he would expect to feel at the image of Felix struggling to wrangle his horse while he was out of commission, a startled gratitude lances through Sylvain so fiercely he nearly forgets how to breathe. Coupled with that, fragments of their last battle are now returning to him - a grip tight on the fur of his collar, him being towed along by someone as they cut a path to their healer.

Felix isn’t much of a words guy, as Sylvain understands it. Well. He definitely says words, but it can be a harrowing experience for everyone involved. For anyone who pays attention to what he does, though, it’s not that hard to get the message. 

“I might as well go flag down Mercedes. Let her know you’ve woken up.”

“Felix, wait.” Even sitting, Felix is just barely close enough to catch by the wrist, and Sylvain has to lean over the edge of the bed in a way that tears something on his side. Stitches? Whoops. At least Mercedes is going to be coming by soon. “Thanks. As always.” 

He almost continues _for being more invested in keeping me alive than I am_ , but he knows how that’d go over. Instead, he does this soothing thumb-rubby thing on Felix’s pulse point, a slow, rhythmic drag that a lot of people seem to like. Felix, who’d looked like he was about to say something, does a peerless impression of a surprised cat, round-eyed and still.

Yeah, the thumb thing always works.

-

His father’s grave is a temporary one. 

Whenever the war ends, they plan to have his body moved to Fraldarius. Lay him to rest in the homeland he dedicated so much of his life to, or something. 

Just because Felix agrees to the idea doesn’t necessarily mean that he understands it. Location doesn’t make a difference to someone that’s dead. Rodrigue himself was a big fan of pointless gestures like that, though, so he’s got no objections.

For now, he’s kept in the small cemetery tucked behind the knights’ hall at Garreg Mach. Though it’s been a full six days since they’ve buried him, he hadn’t visited it until now. There’d been an informal sort of service, sure, but Felix wasn’t keen to stick around and listen to another parade of eulogies. Though it’s nighttime, there’s enough light to pick out the newly-packed soil of his fresh grave.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing in front of it now. His best unit of measurement was Sylvain, who had tagged along. Because of course he had. It must’ve been a good few minutes, at least, because the dragging silence was just starting to make him antsy. Felix can hear him right behind him, shuffling in place like a bored child.

“Should we, uh,” Sylvain’s rubbing the back of his neck, he imagines. “Say something, or?”

He remembers people speaking to his brother’s grave, too. Felix, at the time, hadn’t been in any state to come up with a poignant final message. “Why? He won’t hear it.” And even if words _could_ reach his father from wherever he was now, he had no paucity of them from the rest of their army. Lots of _noble sacrifice_ this and _good man_ that. He doesn’t need any more from the son he was embarrassed to claim half the time.

“Okaaay, well, maybe you wanna blow off some steam while we’re here together?” Before Felix can visit boundless wrath upon him, Sylvain clarifies, “Emotionally! I mean, why does it have to be for him? Maybe you’d benefit by being able to get things off your chest with no judgment.”

“What’s there to be judged for?”

Sylvain’s voice takes on a low, private tone, despite the fact that they’re the only living creatures there. “I mean, come on. It’s not a huge secret that you and Rodrigue weren’t in the best place with each other. So maybe you wanna get the last word in? Or, hey,” he says, considering. “Maybe you don’t mourn _him_ so much as you mourn what you could’ve had with him if things didn't shake out. How they did. You know? Stuff that wouldn’t make it onto an elegy.”

Felix sours at the uncharitable parallel being drawn. “That's insulting. It’s not like my old man ever tried to murder me.” 

“Well yeah, fuck, I hope not,” laughs Sylvain. “But still, you guys had some major issues, didn’t you? Don’t lie.”

His hand flexes around nothing, restless. There’s no solution here, nothing actionable to do but stand and stare at an unmarked stone. “So I did. But I don’t think telling that to a patch of dirt has as much catharsis as you seem to believe it does.”

“Then why are you here?”

Over the past five years, he and his father had been too caught up with the war effort to exchange many words that weren’t related to it. And even before then, while he was attending school, there was only all the sighing about how difficult a child Felix was, how thickheaded. He was an afterthought to his father more often than not, and a burdensome one at that, from the way he spoke sometimes.

There’s a sense of obligation, he thinks, in finding soft memories to offer the dead. He isn’t without them. Most took place before Glenn, but a few had come after; fleeting moments that he found to be dispiriting in their scarcity now that he had the time to look back. 

“I don’t know,” he finally admits, so weakly the words are barely granted voice. His old man had spent his last breath on another man’s son, and the entirety of his life on his service to a dead king’s memory. He didn’t know how to grieve in a way someone like that would understand.

He’s not surprised to feel Sylvain’s arms winding around his waist from behind, coaxing him to lean backwards. Felix’s back comes to fit against his chest, practiced as a blade between the ribs. 

“Are you trying not to cry?” Sylvain says, closer than before. Felix can feel his chin digging into the top of his head. “Don’t hold back. It’s just me.” 

Felix doesn’t deny it. But he _does_ pinch Sylvain’s forearm to get him to shut up.

These days Sylvain has to walk around in full plate so often that he’d forgotten how much warmth he seemed to naturally give off. Right now, being pressed to him without a barrier of steel feels like putting his hands up to a campfire. It makes it easier to think.

Felix can remember instances from when he was young, where his father and even his brother didn’t know how to deal with the emotion that seemed to constantly overwhelm him. Regardless of how silly the reason, Sylvain would let him cling for comfort, or came up with banal little distractions for him, or listened to his troubles with a grave seriousness, as if it were a life or death matter. 

Nostalgia was a hindrance to him. Over and over, the people around Felix had shown him the folly of indulging in it. There were some things they could only access now through memories that have grown honeyed over time; thick and cloying. But there were also some things that had endured, even if nothing else had.

“Do you wanna stay here? You don't have to leave flowers or make a speech or anything.”

Felix shakes his head.

“Alright.” Sylvain steps back from their embrace, but only enough to throw an arm around his shoulders instead. “Listen, I actually found a full bottle of something in my old room. I think my parents sent it for my birthday? I’m sure it’s still good…layer of dust aside. Polish it off with me?”

Knowing Sylvain’s tastes, it’s probably going to be something fruity and unbearable. Still, he accepts the diversion.

When they leave the cemetery, his eyes are forward.


End file.
